A tangent on my latest Tumblr comment

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, discussion of anxiety, (arguably) discourse]


*This* post doesn't really do the thing, but I've seen a lot of *other* posts in this sphere of topic treat "stress" and "anxiety" as things that are problems *in themselves* as opposed to symptoms, and recommend ""treatment"" methods that do nothing to solve the underlying problem. Are a lot of people just so accustomed to pathological generalised anxiety that they've forgotten that sometimes anxiety is *for* something?

Do you know what immediately resolved almost all of my COVID anxiety? It wasn't bubble baths, or meditation, or being forgiving to myself, or any of that: it was *getting a respirator*. Dangerous situations are stressful, and making a situation much less dangerous makes it much less stressful!

Stop shooting the messenger and start fixing the danger.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

... these models of anxiety and anger seem about right to me. Though my anger does usually get stymied by needing to hand off it's goals to parts of my self with better long-range planning to even conduct coherent text conversations and those long-range planning modules are pretty good at suggesting calming down as an important first step in the plan. We'll see how that goes in the inevitable case in the long-run that someone I know socially IRL does something that actually makes me angry, which hasn't happened in, like, years probably, at least to a casual examination of my memories.

(Also wow that thing about the pain sounds nice. I have a bad time with pain for various reasons which I am having trouble picking apart effectively to write about and it'd be nice to just ... not have to worry about that? I guess though if I'm having trouble solving long-term/chronic problems even when they're actively unpleasant I wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell if they weren't, though.)